Norfolk Groyne session

Duncs and I headed out for a session on the Norfolk Groyne, Hove at the beginning of the month. We had shop bought Black and King as bait, and the high tide was at around 20:00.

With Duncs only having had a few fishing sessions at this point in his short fishing career, I was confident that this, my favourite venue, could produce some good results for us.

Thornback Ray, Norfolk Groyne, July 2009

We got to the venue at about 17:30, giving plenty of time to get set up. I set up a slider rig on my rod, and for some reason, chose to rig up Duncs with a clip on the end of his line, on to which I clipped a hooklength and a weight. This ended up being a blessing, when after being in the water for a short time, the shoals of Mackerel materialised on the surface, on a feeding frenzy, chasing the whitebait. The slider rig isn’t the most flexible when it comes to swapping rigs, but the rig on Duncs’ rod enabled us to switch straight over to feathers.

Mackerel feathers clipped on, I cast them in to the shoal, and Duncs reeled in, hooking our biggest Mackerel of the night straight away, and a new species for Duncs. Sweet. Another cast resulted in two Joey Mackerel; all went back to swim another day. At this point, the shoal moved on and we went back to fishing a standard baited rig each. We did switch back to feathers several more times during the evening, catching one more Mackerel.

This proved a good start to a productive night.. the next fish was one of my favourite species to catch – a Thornback Ray, albeit a rather small one! Brilliant fish to catch, although it didn’t fight as much as the others I’ve caught – I thought it was a flatty before it came to the surface. So it was a pleasant surprise, especially as it was on Black Lug – I’ve only ever caught them on Peeler Crab before.

It was dark by this time, so in our efforts to get some good photos on our camera phones (poor show), we neglected to get anything in the photo that helped show the scale of the fish – it really was about as small as a Thornie can get though ; )

During the session I also caught an Eel (which didn’t snarl up my rig!) and a Pouting, with Duncs getting a Pouting in the same cast. Duncs also had a Bream from one cast, and another Mackerel.

Overall, we had 9 fish between us, including 5 species – a great session for the variety of species caught, great weather, and some enjoyable Mackerel bashing!